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Why Wyoming<\/strong><\/p>\n I spend a lot of my working hours daydreaming of Wyoming. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n George Neame<\/strong> is a publisher in London, but in recent years has lived in Tennessee, Dublin and Leeds. His poetry has previously appeared in\u00a0the moth<\/i>,\u00a0Acumen\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0Antiphon<\/i>.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Why Wyoming I spend a lot of my working hours daydreaming of Wyoming. I\u2019ve never been to Wyoming, but I know the marshland smells prehistoric, and the foothills of the mountains run rugged and unpredictably through pinewood forests and streams with names like Encampment River and Wolverine Creek. I know this because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20373"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20374,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20373\/revisions\/20374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI\u2019ve never been to Wyoming, but I know
\nthe marshland smells prehistoric, and the foothills
\nof the mountains run rugged and unpredictably
\nthrough pinewood forests and streams with names
\nlike Encampment River and Wolverine Creek.
\nI know this because at any moment I could leave
\nmy desk in Liverpool Street to start a new life in Wyoming,
\nwalking until the bluffs blister my toes and sleeping
\nunder the stars on the banks of Meadowlark Lake.
\nIt humbles me to know that each morning, someone
\nwakes up to drive to work at the Pioneer Museum
\nin Ten Sleep, Wyoming, while someone else switches
\non the popcorn machine at the Buffalo Theatre,
\nabout ten miles south of Saddlestring, Wyoming.
\nAnd if the junegrass of Northern Wyoming becomes
\ntoo familiar, we can uproot ourselves from the
\nmountain brooks and paddle downriver to the
\nbubbling springs of Thermopolis, Wyoming, and
\nthe copper canyons of the Wind River Reservation
\nwhere bison roam the planes and kick up
\nrust-coloured dust in the stretched evening sunlight.
\nWhy Wyoming? Wyoming has a population of
\naround 577,000. If each line in this poem were
\nan equal portion of Wyoming, only 15,000
\npeople would live on each one. If we in this room
\nwere the only occupants of Wyoming, we\u2019d each
\nhave (97,914 divided by number of people in the room)
\nkilometres to ourselves and would in all probability
\nnever see or hear of another human being
\nfor the rest of our lives.
\nOn a silent midwinter morning, I picture the
\nimprints of black bears in powdery snow,
\nice forming silently in the pebbly shallows of
\nriver bends, and hoarfrost on the bluestem
\ngrasslands of Thunder Basin.
\nI\u2019ve never felt more awake
\nthan when dreaming of Wyoming.<\/p>\n